Manhattan Project

109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos, by Jennet Conant. Simon & Schuster. 432 pages. $26.95. The 60th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki this year has unleashed a flurry of books about the Manhattan Project and some of its most colorful figures. But in 109 East Palace, Jennet Conant stakes out less-trafficked territory, producing an engaging portrait of life on the remote mesa that served as backdrop for the world's most audacious scientific enterprise.

WASHINGTON - Geiger counters crackle continuously in a low, ominous mutter as you move through the replica of the first atomic bomb laboratory that sculptor Jim Sanborn has created at Washington's Corcoran Gallery of Art. Oscilloscopes hum and flicker blue dancing lines that move across the screens like lunging fencers. Sanborn has re-created almost exactly the work tables where scientists of the Manhattan Project moved uranium and plutonium closer and closer to the critical mass that would release the power of the nuclear bomb.

Richard G. Broden, a retired Westinghouse Electric Corp. electrical engineer whose 42-year career extended from the Manhattan Project to AWACS surveillance aircraft, died of cancer Thursday at his Ellicott City home. He was 83. Mr. Broden was born and raised in Edgewood, Pa., a suburb of Pittsburgh. He earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1942 from Carnegie Tech, now Carnegie Mellon University. He had been working for three months at Pittsburgh Research Laboratories after graduation when he was recruited by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories in Livermore, Calif.

WASHINGTON -- Before the United States establishes a Department of Homeland Security, our elected leaders must recognize that certain ingredients are missing. For all of the post-Sept. 11 retrospection, the role of this new department is still unclear. No one has yet shown how the nation will be safer because of it. The legislation has not closed or addressed major organizational gaps, including those between intelligence and law enforcement duties. Despite the legislation, national security still remains organized largely on Cold War assumptions and the 1947 National Security Act. That law established the National Security Council and the CIA, and integrated the War and Navy departments, along with the newly created Air Force, into a single agency that became the Defense Department in 1949.

Carter L. Burgess, 85, assistant secretary of defense for President Dwight D. Eisenhower and a one-time aide who was entrusted to deliver news to France of the planned Normandy invasion, died Sunday in Roanoke, Va. Mr. Burgess rose from second lieutenant to colonel during World War II. He worked under General Eisenhower as secretary of the general staff of Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Forces. While stationed in England, Mr. Burgess delivered a message from General Eisenhower to Gen. Charles de Gaulle, then in North Africa, informing him of the plans to invade Normandy.

Boyce D. McDaniel, 84, a Manhattan Project physicist who was the last man to check the atomic bomb before the first test of the device in July 1945, died of a heart attack May 8 in Ithaca, N.Y. Dr. McDaniel had recently finished his doctoral work at Cornell University in 1943 when he was invited to join the Manhattan Project team. McDaniel was paid $250 a month and worked 10- to 15-hour days at the secret Los Alamos, N.M., facility. As part of the cyclotron research team, he played an important role in helping to identify the amount of the isotope uranium-235 needed to create the atomic fission to detonate a nuclear bomb.

MY BEST SHOT A stroll on the lake bY Laila Snyder, Dundalk This is a picture of my grandson Chris taken by his father on a trip to Smith Mountain Lake in Virginia. It was taken just before he went under, and it looks like he's walking on water. A MEMORABLE PLACE Los Alamos' quiet power By Aldema Ridge Recent news from Los Alamos, N.M., was not good. Wildfires ripped through sacred lands of the Pueblo people. Missing computer hard drives threatened national security. But in April, when I traveled to Los Alamos, salmon- colored mountains were still covered with pines.

Researchers from the National Archives, reclassifying millions of records holding some of the nation's most closely guarded nuclear secrets, have made a startling discovery -- some of the documents are themselves radioactive. More than 50 years after the Manhattan Project ushered in the Atomic Age, researchers working for the Department of Energy found a gray dust on a few of the papers that turned out to be uranium, archive and Energy Department officials said. While the contamination is limited to a few boxes, the Energy Department plans to conduct a sweep of the archives in College Park by the end of the year to check for contamination.

If ever a film was meant to be seen under the stars, it's "October Sky," a marvelous evocation of what it was like to be a kid in the early days of the space race (it's set in the months after the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik) and a poignant look at how fathers and sons can connect in all sorts of ways. It's also that rarest of rarities, a family film suitable for all ages.So thank goodness D. Vogel and his Bengies Drive-In have returned for yet another season of open-air film exhibition.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- It was supposed to be a kind of detective story, the clever unmasking of the identity of a former Manhattan Project scientist who may have passed atomic secrets to the Soviets during World War II.Instead, it has turned into an acrimonious battle to preserve the reputation of one of the nation's most revered scientists, after charges of espionage were leveled against him by a respected public-interest activist and author.What makes the story especially odd and poignant is that the two men were longtime friends.